"Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way"
About this Quote
A line like this lands as both boast and bruise: Rosenberg frames his poetic education as an accident nobody bothered to arrange. The syntax is plain, almost stubbornly unliterary, and that’s the point. “Nobody” appears twice, hammering home absence - not just of guidance, but of institutional permission. “Put poetry in my way” borrows the language of street life and labor more than salons and seminars, hinting that art, for him, wasn’t a genteel inheritance but something you’d have to trip over on your own.
The intent reads as a quiet indictment of class gatekeeping. Rosenberg, a working-class Jewish poet in early 20th-century Britain, is pointing at the invisible infrastructure behind “natural talent”: libraries you’re encouraged to use, teachers who notice you, families that assume books belong in the home. By denying he ever had that, he refuses the romantic myth of the poet as a born oracle. He makes the making of a poet political.
There’s also a defensive pride in the phrasing. If no one “told” him what to read, his voice can’t be dismissed as merely well-trained; it’s self-forged, and therefore harder to domesticate. Coming from a writer later known for searing First World War poetry, the line gains extra bite: a man who had to hunt for art ends up producing work that outlasts the institutions that overlooked him. The subtext is less “look what I overcame” than “look who never bothered to open the door.”
The intent reads as a quiet indictment of class gatekeeping. Rosenberg, a working-class Jewish poet in early 20th-century Britain, is pointing at the invisible infrastructure behind “natural talent”: libraries you’re encouraged to use, teachers who notice you, families that assume books belong in the home. By denying he ever had that, he refuses the romantic myth of the poet as a born oracle. He makes the making of a poet political.
There’s also a defensive pride in the phrasing. If no one “told” him what to read, his voice can’t be dismissed as merely well-trained; it’s self-forged, and therefore harder to domesticate. Coming from a writer later known for searing First World War poetry, the line gains extra bite: a man who had to hunt for art ends up producing work that outlasts the institutions that overlooked him. The subtext is less “look what I overcame” than “look who never bothered to open the door.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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